Haiti needs democracy as well as donations
Posted on Thursday 14 January, 2010
Filed Under International
THE LISBON earthquake of 1755 claimed something like 100,000 lives, a total more or less the same as the estimated death toll from precisely the same cause in Haiti yesterday.
Among the arguably less important consequences of the earlier devastation was a famous bust-up between two leading figures of the Enlightenment, over what philosophers of religion now refer to as the problem of natural evil.
Voltaire insisted that any God who can permit such carnage can hardly be described as benevolent. Rousseau countered that the actions of humanity contribute must take some of the blame; because rickety buildings were erected and people forced to live in close confinement, the Lisbon body count was exacerbated greatly.
I’m not that sure that the two arguments can logically be counterposed. But Rousseau is right to stress that much can be deduced about a society by the way it handles natural disasters. Science and statistical analysis make it easily possible to assess their likelihood, and to take measures to mitigate them when they occur. The trouble is, there needs to be the political will to put the necessary preparations in place.
Earth science has long established that Haiti sits on a fault line. Yet according to the mayor of Port-au-Prince, 60% of the buildings were poorly constructed. One reason that builders get away with it is that there are no safety standards. Moreover, the state had made no real preparation for an outcome that could readily have been predicted. Why is this so?
I have not personally visited Haiti. But from most accounts, it is a textbook example of the way capitalism operates in many of the world’s poorest countries, with the Washington Consensus enforcing by the use of arms policies that succeed only in enriching a small local elite, while ensuring the general impoverishment of everybody else.
The US openly backed the governments of Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc Duvalier between 1957 to 1986 – even though they were widely ranked among the most corrupt dictatorships on the planet – as a cold war counterweight to Cuba. Sweatshop labour in US-oriented export processing zones swelled the numbers flocking to the slums of Port-au-Prince.
The election Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theologian standing on a broadly social democratic platform, was supposed to change all that. He never got a chance to implement his programme, and was toppled by a military coup within months of taking office in 1991.
He was restored to power three years later, following a US military intervention ordered by Bill Clinton. The quid pro quo was that he was instructed to stick to free market policies. Aristide did his best to split the difference, trying to be both a good reformist and a good neoliberal at the same time. Inevitably, this pleased no-one, and in 2004 he was toppled again, with full complicity from Bush.
The interim regime of Gérard Latortue dismantled Aristide’s reforms, and then let the death squads rip, while the new boss and his cronies pocketed around $4bn in aid donations for their personal gain. Aristide ally René Préval nominally secured victory in the 2006 elections. But nobody is daft enough to believe that the head of state is actually running the show. Brazilian-led UN forces protect the rich, and may even collaborate with the rightwing death squads that rule the streets.
Decades of political drift have done nothing to address deep-seated poverty, crumbling infrastructure and large scale deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters, with severe hurricanes striking the country in 2004 and 2008.
By all means put your hand in your pocket for the emergency relief appeal. It would be inhumane not to do so. But Voltaire’s argument about God applies with equal force to social and political systems; Haiti needs independence from the tutelage of a superpower that notably failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina half a decade ago.
Unless it gets a government with democratic legitimacy and the freedom to implement progressive policies that bring about meaningful economic development, the buildings will collapse again the next time round.
UPDATE: The best channel for donations from people on the left is probably this one.
<<Go back
Comments
24 Responses to “Haiti needs democracy as well as donations”
-
- Yemen: an unfinished revolution
- Comment Is Free: An honours system for those who fight to make Britain a better place
- Democracy crushed; elected President arrested; World wrings its hands
- Fabians change policy on unpaid internships
- Kamal al-Fayoumi arrested as Egyptian regime retaliates to strikes
-
-
Meta
-
Can’t the convoy on its way back from deportation from Egypt get back out on its jollies? Stopping off at Havana for a consignment of cigars, followed by an attempt to try to enter Haiti via Miami, just to get a name in the papers.
Are you trying to claim that Cuba would have managed to deal with a disaster like this better, considering countless thousands died in the first few minutes? I doubt that much-vaunted universal healthcare system could have done much about that.
That’s an interesting point, Para.
Yes, thousands die in the first few minutes. I have been to Havana, and have little doubt many buildings would collapse instantly.
I’m not an apologist for Ma Castro’s boys. But are you saying that decent healthcare would not save many lives in the circumstances?
Oh, and Dean … there you go, I’m castigating imperialism instead of Muslims. Just for you.
You didn’t mention Toussaint L’ouverture, the Spartacus of the Caribbean. Or Raoul Cedras, leader of the mulatto military junta which overthrew Titid, the democratically elected president of Haiti. Remember the far-left’s reaction to Operation Uphold Democracy: “America out of Haiti,” God help us. Not its finest hour.
Maybe Para should compare how Cuba deals with hurricanes and the US response to Hurricane Katrina. 3 massive hurricanes that hit Cuba in 2008 left 7 dead. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 and left 1800 dead.
Firstly my heart goes out to the people of Haiti and I will give as much as I can to the aid organisations.
Clearly this was an unprecedented disaster and we should bear that in mind but the fact remains that the infrastructure was not up to the job and that its relationship with the US has not benefited it in any positive way. Its provision of social goods, be it housing, education or healthcare is sub standard when compared with Cuba. The lesson is obvious, US vested interests have no interest in the welfare of Haitians or any other peoples they dominate, they only have self interest and that self interest doesn’t even extend to the poor within its own nation, as Katrina illustrated.
And let’s hope Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalist model does not come to fruition, I have my fears.
Thanksd for the link dave
And for the great article.
When disasters like this happens, it puts the disagreements we have in lefty blog land into perspective!
andy newman. I suppose it is helpful to be a lefty in a lefty blogland rather than an apologist for fascists. Not meaning yourself of course. The living people of Haiti need all the help any country can give. It seems the dreaded US of A is first in again. Dreadful country who would want any help from them!
It certainly does put our “little” rangles into perspective Andy, but isn’t that the idealism of capitalism – keep the masses occupied in their own little patch? cynical view but I think it’s true.
people don’t seem to know or care on the whole that for example kids are working just to survive to suit the economies of the world. we live in sad times considering our collective knowledge, technological abilities and global communications. It’s a sad shame that only now people will know the plight of others in another part of our small world. I hope they get help soon …. as I hope to for help for those in refugee camps, for all those dragged off the fields & into factories in the name of economics and democracy. is there still hope for a just world?
shona. Why ask Andy. People do care.
Speaking as one who lives in the universally derided United States, I can speak from a position of some authority concerning the matter of care.
Americans don’t care. I mean that as a self-authenticating ontologically a priori and borderline Heideggerian statement. Not about anything. Least of all for the poor, and god help them if their skin isn’t white while they go about the none-too-merry business of being poor.
Pat Robertson has been quoted as suggesting that Haitians’ interest in voodoo may have moved God to send them an earthquake.
A theologian might equally argue that if it weren’t for the continued intercession of Baron Samedi with the Blessed Virgin, the Lord God and the rest of the Trinity, Haiti would get an annual earthquake.
I think Robertson actually said that Haiti is cursed because it did a deal with the Devil to free it from French colonial rule. More detail over on Stroppyblog.
Another worthwhile recipient for donations is TUC Aid: http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/tuc-17424-f0.cfm
I’m a little uncomfortable with this “puts our arguments innto perspective” thing. The scale of capitalist disaster surely makes it even more important that we win socialism, and therefore important that we discuss how best to achieve that – which necessarily involves a little arguing, doesn’t it?
If we believe the awful people at the ‘Daily Mail’ the Haitians – some of them, anyway – are using corpses to block roads in protest against the slowness of aid reaching them …
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1243417/Haiti-earthquake-Furious-survivors-pile-corpses-road-blocks-demand-emergency-aid.html
I’m sure you’ll all give even more generously now.
I will not be giving anything, in fact I’m fed up with giving money, lets See the rich give a bit more for once not the poor.
I’ve lost interest in death and dying, perhaps because I do not care anymore. after 13 years of new labour we can say we get use to it.
something from FRSO/OSCL from the US on the issue: Haiti Emergency Step One: Donations!
As usual, Jimmy Glesga is wrong. The US was not the first country sending aid to Haiti – that honour goes to Cuba, largely because it already had 300 doctors in the country.
The US, of course, historically owes Haiti much more than the 100 million dollars promised by Obama. The US is directly responsibly for much of the misery and impoverishment inflicted on Haiti in the 20th century.
US forces invaded Haiti in 1915 and occupied the country until 1934. In those days US politicians were quite honest about the purpose of invasions. Woodrow Wilson boasted that he was sending the marines in “to defend American and foreign interests”. Not Haitian ones.
Among those interests was the sole bank in Haiti, owned by American companies, including the National City Bank of New York. The Americans were also nervous that Haiti might renege on repaying debts to American and French banks. The occupation regime ensured that getting on for half of Haiti’s
revenues were spent on servicing those debts.
Later in the century, the Duvalier family, backed to the hilt by the US, seized power, and embarked on three decades (1957-1986) of looting, while the Tonton Macoute death squads tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Haitian democrats.
And when a genuine reformist, in the shape of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, came to power, he was twice removed from office at the behest of Washington.
So yes, let’s welcome Obama’s pledges of aid – but in the longer run, what Haiti needs from the US is an end to the political interference and downright extortion that has characterised relations between thee two countries for so long.
We should all bite the head off a rooster or two as an offering to Baron Samedi.
Baron Samedi will then appear in the dreams of Bill Gates and other rich people and persuade them to pump so much dosh into Haiti that people like us would want to move there.
Socialist unity have a couple of useful links about the tradegy in Haiti, one is Naomi Klein warning against disaster capitalism, as I warned against earlier.
Seems to have all gone quiet on the pro imperialist front.
Isn’t it heart warming to see the news media of the ‘civilised’ world searching through the devastation and dead bodies to find the perfect photo opportunity to send to the ‘civilised’ folks back home.
from 2008 — zizek — reviewing a bYooK and that>
Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary fight against slavery, which ended in independence in January 1804. “Only in Haiti,” Hallward notes, “was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day.” For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things”. The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint ‘Ouverture, it was clearly “ahead of his time”, “premature” and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an event than the French Revolution itself. It was the first time that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of returning to their pre-colonial “roots”, but on behalf of universal principles of freedom and equality. And a sign of the Jacobins’ authenticity is that they quickly recognised the slaves’ uprising – the black delegation from Haiti was enthusiastically received in the National Assembly in Paris. (As you might expect, things changed after Thermidor; in 1801 Napoleon sent a huge expeditionary force to try to regain control of the colony).
Denounced by Talleyrand as “a horrible spectacle for all white nations”, the “mere existence of an independent Haiti” was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price – the literal price – for the “premature” independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti’s payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time when some US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black Americans for slavery, Haiti’s demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous sum the former slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognised has been largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.
The story goes on today. The Lavalas movement has won every free presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim of US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a political agent which won state power through free elections, but which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local popular democracy, of people’s direct self-organisation. Although the “free press” dominated by its enemies was never obstructed, although violent protests that threatened the stability of the legal government were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was routinely demonised in the international press as exceptionally violent and corrupt. The goal of the US and its allies France and Canada was to impose on Haiti a “normal” democracy – a democracy which would not touch the economic power of the narrow elite; they were well aware that, if it is to function in this way, democracy has to cut its links with direct popular self-organisation.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/517494/
Bled fuckking dry
Hello blogger, good morning. Wonderful post. You have gained a new reader. Pleasee continue this awesome work and I look forward to more of your superb articles.
Hey, i’ve been reading this blog for a while and have a question, maybe you can help… it’s how do i add your feed to my rss reader as i want to follow you. Thanks.
Metro headline in Glasgow today. ‘Thugs taking over in Haiti’. Must be a young editorial team or have they just arrived on the planet.
paul fauvet. I was being flippant with my comment for the benefit of the US hating looney lefties. If Cuba was in that is great but you know that the US will provide most aid. And well done Cuba. Maybe this disaster will bring the US and Cuba a bit closer and end the nonsense between them.